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Poverty No Be Craze O Na Dynamite By Farouk Martins Aresa
There are so many warnings of the coming revolution in Nigeria but the oppressors remained unmoved. They will not desist from their evil deprivation of their countrymen. If heaven is going to fall, they reason, it will fall on all of us. In their case, they may even escape to those countries where their vaults are intact. Well, tolerance for Nigerians is at its lowest in any country these days. We need more revolutionary parties at home.
There was a notice of imminent war heard by cripples that moved on slowly before war started while able bodies were trapped. The same was true of Tsunami, as the animals sought higher ground, humans were waiting. Many rich people take poverty for granted. The same way we shout at blind people thinking they are also deaf and dumb. But deaf people either ignore us or turn off their hearing aids when they cannot be bordered.
Indeed, some social scientists claim the kidnapping and unrest that are spreading across Nigeria are symptoms of dynamite that may disintegrate our prospects. There is poverty in the land of plenty. It has been hijacked to favor a few individuals. Our best brains are underutilized because they all rush for the black gold. The oil industry consumes the attention of our best and the brightest to politics for easy access to money and fame as the capacity to think, invent, manufacture and sell our uniqueness suffer.
Some of our brightest young men have taken to white collar crimes to live up to the “megida” of our time. The intellects that could be utilized to move the Country forward are wasted in jails at home and all over the world as they are sooner or later caught. A few are waiting on the death row. Others terrorize those at home that cannot afford vigilante for protection. Once in a while, the highly protected class is caught in rivalry or robberies, drawing attention to what the common man face daily. Whatever it is, it is not proportional justice according to our transgressions. Guess what? Some children of the rich cannot find jobs. Children are falling into the gutters the parents dug for others.
Crafty politicians with blind ambition dressed in sheep skin but that are in fact voracious animals posturing to the poor masses to exploit their wave of anger to the top. So we have lions preaching to us that stealing a fowl when hungry is worse than them stealing a cow. Tell us to close our eyes while they pray so that they can steal us blind. Many of them are opportunists desperate for power. They undermine African sovereignty and trade by sheer lack of experience and exposure that make it easier to be recruited by spy masters overseas in exchange for political support and leadership.
We have great men with us, some are discarded into history. Any country that can produce the genes of Aminu Kano, Pa Imodu, Solarin, Mbakwe, Saro Wiwa and many others cannot be denied of conscientious leaders right now or in the future. They are either not interested and if they are Soyinka Party may lose. We have to stop saying and thinking that way though. We deserve more. There are at least three states where politicians that are not related or connected to black gold-rush have been elected.
Auspiciously we have Mimiko that got elected on the platform of Labor Party in Ondo, which some said was impossible; and Obi that got elected on the platform of APGA in Anambra, which was not easy. Gov. Shekarau in Kano came in with ANPP and he is hailed as the best leader in that State ever. It is important to note that Anambra and Ondo were in turmoil and were not necessarily the richest in revenue collection like Lagos or in oil income as Delta states. The three states have proved wrong those of us who claimed they can only be elected if connected to some vagabonds or “money-miss-road” party. There are a few more but time will bear them out.
Unfortunately, they compare themselves to who ‘stole-more’ and turned many of us into cynics because we can no longer differentiate between the hidden dedicated civil servants from the oppressive civil masters. They fight ruthlessly in order to blackmail those amongst them that are dedicated to duty and fair play. A minister once bragged that he could not be caught in corruption, David West was charged for accepting wrist watch. So, many of us have been reduced to clamoring for the least of all the evils. Our expectation of a good leader is so low, we worship one eye man in a realm of the blinds.
Well, within those dumps are volcanoes waiting to erupt in anger. Dump of people are like dumps by definition. They ferment and produce gases that can blow up. We can either tame fermentation of dumps into recyclable power to produce energy, or waste it and let it blows up in our faces. A hungry man is an angry man, sooner or later he will bite hard. Who and when he bites may not be predictable, but we hope our oppressors get caught in the mess they created.
The world recession feels like depression in many African countries. We never had good infrastructures to begin with and our social system depends on private individual family system, not from governments as in the rich countries. Yet they preach privatization to us. There was this report which claims that we are doing better in this world recession than rich countries; comparatively we guess, meaning it could have been worse.
Many rich people are friends of the poor and they demonstrate it by generous donation to causes to lift them up, others participate in voluntary organizations too. Even some billionaires are challenging one another to donate. Those, like African champions of the rich feel they do not need the poor but only as casual workers, thugs and as bodyguards, to be discarded when they please. Germany, of all the countries in the world, based on exports not crude oil, seems to be showing better signs of life in this economic recovery.
While champion of the rich in other capitalist countries point to their hard work, they fail to realize that German workers cannot be easily discarded as in other countries and the Germans did not shed jobs for any or no reason during recession.
Only a dying man knows the pinch of death. As poverty bites harder those unfortunate and our children living in dumps know their governments have turned a blind eye. So they expect little. Each man for himself as destiny dictates for all of us. It is written some would say. Some governments even deny there are dumps in their states until exposure. |